A shield is great for some things... particuarly "plugging in" lots of connections to something external. However, to add an LCD panel to my Arduino, I only need to tap the serial line and 5v and 0v if I spend $8 for a complete kit of parts (except the panel itself) for the great little LCD panel controller from ModernDevice.com (no "S" in that). It is an implementation of Peter Anderson's #117.

"Except the panel..." The kit lets you interface a wide range of panels to the Arduino. Hence the need to purchase it "separately". ModernDevice offer a selection. Some only $12, if memory serves.

It should even be possible to drive the thing from something other than the serial out pin, but that would entail a little more software work. If you are willing to use the serial pin (and that won't stop you uploading programs to the Arduino) then all you need is.....

setup(){serial.start(9600);}loop(){serial.Print("Hello world");}

Why reinvent an already available wheel? There are so many other worthy projects waiting out there!!

A shield is great for some things... particuarly "plugging in" lots of connections to something external. However, to add an LCD panel to my Arduino, I only need to tap the serial line and 5v and 0v if I spend $8 for a complete kit of parts (except the panel itself) for the great little LCD panel controller from ModernDevice.com (no "S" in that). It is an implementation of Peter Anderson's #117.

"Except the panel..." The kit lets you interface a wide range of panels to the Arduino. Hence the need to purchase it "separately". ModernDevice offer a selection. Some only $12, if memory serves.

It should even be possible to drive the thing from something other than the serial out pin, but that would entail a little more software work.

Why reinvent an already available wheel? There are so many other worthy projects waiting out there!!

(My only association with ModernDevice: Happy customer.)

If TTL serial is the only interface required then the board kit in your link is a dollar cheaper (on the moderndevice.com page its shown as $9 plus shipping). But for some applications (like mine), the hardware serial port is not available (its used for data logging to a PC) and the baud rate (even at 19200) is too slow to use a software uart. For those of us that have real time applications that need something like an i2c interface, a serial only board won't cut it.

But even if my application didn't require the higher prformance, the board being discussed in this thred has greater appeal for me because for the cost of an extra dollar its much more flexible than a serial only board.

chrisco

The 16x2 LCD board is great and I would also be interested in the Graphics board. I am thinking of using this with "sensor shields", e.g. I want to monitor the depth of a water tank using a pressure sensor.Chris

blalor

Nick, I'm definitely interested in your OpenLCD project. I started playing around with a 16x2 display last night, starting with the 8 bit interface and then going to 4, and then this morning I was thinking that it should be simple (and cheap) to delegate control to another Arduino chip. Lo and behold, I stumble upon this thread! So, please keep us posted on your progress! I'd love to see some code in the SF SVN repository... (hint, hint! )

blalor

Update: The PCBs are on their way and will arrive on Monday.Now to chase up the components.....

Sweet! The more I build up my current project (an intervalometer for my camera), the more I realize I need some way to offload the LCD connections somewhere else. I'm using every single pin and I still want to do things like toggle the backlight and add another button or two. Ugh. And I'm already using 4 bit mode, which is noticeably slower than 8 bit!